Stealing the Blinds

Stealing the Blinds is something that every player must do whether it is to make a progression through a tournament or keep their hourly win rate up in a cash game. To effectively steal blinds you shouldn’t be opening up every hand you see on the button or from the cutoff, but you should be playing a lot of hands to make the most of out of your poker bonus amount. Any two cards above an 8 in the pocket should be good enough to raise and make an attempt to take the blinds down. Also, hands like K7 or A6 are good enough to try and take the pot down pre-flop. If you can see how your table is playing you can even open your range of hands up more or cut your range of hands down. It all depends on the players sitting to your left. If these players are three betting a lot or calling off with weaker hands then steer away from stealing their blinds for a round or two around the table. However, if these players are folding you should keep applying pressure on their blinds.

You don’t want to try to steal the blinds from an early position at the table because you have too many hands to dodge, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. If you open the pot in early position with a hand like j10 you can get called and flop middle pair or top pair. Then what do you do? That is not the correct way to try and win blinds before the flop. Ideally, if the table folds around to you and you are on the button or cutoff position you should open the pot up for a raise. When you are stealing the pot you want to try and lose the least so don’t make a raise that is over the size of the pot. Make a raise that is between 2.5 to 3.5 big blinds. That is the way that you can take most of the pots down uncontested. You should lean more towards opening around 3 to 3.5 big blinds because if you open for 2.5 big blinds you will get called a lot of the time with any two cards because you have priced your opponent in to the hand. Also, if you do open the pot for 2.5 big blinds your opponent can sense weakness in your hand, and re-raise you to win the hand. You can do nothing but fold in that instance so making a raise more than that will put more pressure on your opponent, and be for the better.

If you have players limp in front of you and you have a hand like a QJ this is something that can get tricky so the best option is to lay your hand down. You shouldn’t even try to win the hand because when a player limps in to a hand a lot of the time they will want to see the flop with their hand. When you attempt to steal the pot before the flop with mediocre cards you can get in trouble and caught making bluffs. After players have limped in to a hand and you try to steal the pot you will end up getting yourself stuck, and losing more after the flop than you want.